One of the many new HTML5 APIs slowly being implemented by browsers is the Network Information API[2]. It exposes information about the type of network that the connecting device is using. In theory, this allows developers to optimize content around the connection speed of the user. However, as with most HTML5 APIs it is supported only by some browsers with/without prefixes, and has a legacy implementation, so a polyfill is useful when working with the API.

How do it…

The API is located at window.navigator.connection. It has a type property and an ontypechange event. Here is a polyfill I created, based on work by Aurelio De Rosa[1]:

How it works…

The polyfill has three paths: leave the browser implemented connection API alone, replace it with an empty polyfill object, or replace it with a polyfill to mask the legacy version. The first two need no explanation, except the possible type values are:

bluetooth

cellular – connected via mobile network (edge, 3G, 4G, etc.)

ethernet

none – no internet connection

wifi

other – not unknown, but not one of the above either

unknown – couldn’t determine connection type

The legacy API exposes the metered (boolean indicating the connection is metered) and bandwidth (rate in MB/s) properties instead of type. While this is probably more meaningful information, it was difficult to implement and has been replaced with just the type property.

The majority of the legacy polyfill is to implement versions of addEventListener and removeEventListener to mask the DOM event handler functions with custom ones, so that the typechange event can be used instead of the legacy change event. Additionally, the code estimates the type based on the bandwidth value. Obviously, this is very inaccurate, but I believe it returns values in the spirit of how you might use type in a real project.

Whilst this is a fun experiment, use it in production at your own risk. I definitely had some weird data. For example my laptop using the legacy polyfill while connected via wifi, always reported the value Infinite for the bandwidth, so the polyfill type was set to ethernet. However, I do have more than 10MB/s download speeds, so perhaps I exceeded FireFox’s maximum bandwidth value. I was not able to test the polyfill on my mobile devices as none of my devices had the legacy version.

I think the best use for the Network Information API would be to load a page with the lowest viable resolution assets, and dynamically insert larger, more detailed assets if the type iswifi or ethernet.

There’s more…

There is more value in estimating bandwidth than there is from knowing the type, as you can be connected using wifi to another cellphone and shouldn’t assume that wifi means a fast connection. It might be more useful to polyfill the current API with the legacy API by estimating the bandwidth. This could be achieved by timing the download of several small files and calculating a rough bandwidth.

Have you ever included a library and wonder, "how much did this library add to the window object", or passed an object into a function and asked yourself, "did that function modify my object"? Instead of reading the source code, this article shows a quick trick for answering these questions.

How do it…

For starters we need a function to count the number of properties on an object:

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Getting ready

A modern web browser supporting localStorage and JSON. Also, a basic understanding of promises[2] is helpful.